GTD: Gratitude, Trust, and Biblical Wisdom

Dr. John Monson: What's up with that?
Wow.
You all woke up. What happened?
Wow,
that's pretty great.
Thanks for the introduction.
Thanks for having me here.
Last night with a few faculty and with Dr. Mickey and some others,
we just had some great fellowship around a table.
And I have to say, you are so fortunate to be here with this faculty and these administrators
because college is a sort of one-off thing, and don't waste it when you have people like that around.
So it's really, really fun to be here with you.
So I'm going to start by just asking you what the order is here in the auditorium.
Like, how do you all determine who sits where?
Anybody can answer that?
Is it random?
It's random.
So it's some algorithm,
or it's just random.
So I went to a college in Illinois,
and we had quite a bit bigger auditorium.
And every year, they would sort the students by some metric,
and nobody knew what it was.
And so partway through the semester,
somebody would say,
oh, it's by where you were born.
Or somebody said,
oh, it's the day you were born.
Well, there was one year where they figured out that it went by GPA from front to back.
and let's just say I was way near the back so you know it's a miracle that I got into grad school
so if you're wondering about grad school or wondering about things in your life God can
perform miracles even when you don't think he can so I wanted to start with a story today
I was I think 13 or 14 years old and my eyes were not as good and so I went to the optometrist but
This was in the States,
and I grew up overseas.
I grew up in Jerusalem.
So this was not really my culture,
even though,
you know, I have maybe a Midwest accent or something.
And this doctor that they took me to, the optometrist,
you know, he was looking at my eyes and everything.
And then he moved the device aside and looked at me nose to nose,
and he said,
Young man, life's not fair.
I'm like, whoa, what's this?
Bad breath.
Okay, you know, and I don't need a sermon.
I mean, I wasn't cynical,
but I'm just like, whoa.
And he gave me this little speech.
Life is not fair.
Life is not fair.
And the sooner you get that into your head,
then you'll be much happier for it.
I'm like, okay.
So I walked out, and the world was different because I had glasses now,
and the chrome on the cars was shiny,
and the leaves I could see on the trees and so forth.
But I never forget that little episode.
And I thought about it for years and years as life went on.
and it struck me that actually I had many reasons to feel like life was not fair.
I don't know, you don't have to raise your hands,
but how many of you think like,
today, life's not really fair.
I've got to sit through this chapel.
Life's not really fair.
I didn't get a good grade.
Life's not really fair.
Someone broke up with me.
Or life's not really fair.
As I thought about it over the years,
I came to realize that actually as a Christian,
as one who actually believes that I'm a loser
and believes that I can't save myself,
nor can anybody else,
I came to realize that with a gracious God,
a loving God,
actually, I have to be thankful that life's not fair.
Because if life were fair,
I'd be dead.
If life were fair,
then a sovereign God and a righteous God
would send me to damnation
or just not let me live very long.
Everybody know the story of Noah?
The flood?
Well, God is gracious, so he didn't bring another flood.
Instead, he gave us a rainbow.
So I learned later that Dr. Arnold was actually a very, very accomplished man,
not only in optometry,
but he had volunteered at all kinds of schools and hospitals,
had been in the service.
He'd done all kinds of amazing things.
And it was amazing to me because I thought he's such a cantankerous man.
And yet he had this whole life of ministry.
And I saw his obituary and it blew me away because it's a lot more beautiful than mine will be.
So it was quite something.
So what I want to share with you today is just a simple thing, three words,
but also three letters.
So I want you to think for a minute,
G,
T,
D.
In the world of acronyms, can you think of some things that would be G, T, D?
I don't know if you are tracking with the same one that I'll tell you about from my heart, but GTD.
I don't know.
Can you think of anybody?
Think of a good GTD stand for something?
Get the door.
Very good.
That's brilliant, actually.
That's excellent.
That's better than mine.
So let's build a chapel around that, shall we?
Because I think that's a whole lot better than mine.
Anybody else?
GTD?
It's not STP like the oil.
It's not any, anybody else can think of as an oil?
What's that?
Gather the determination.
Gather the determination.
I'm going to take that home with me because.
You can't have my template,
so you're going to have to do that back.
Oh, shucks.
Okay.
I think that's a good one.
I like that, too, because that one gives me something to, like, really to think about, to chew on.
Well, the one I'm going for is gratitude,
trust,
and the third one is don't be an idiot.
And that's my specialty,
by the way.
That's my specialty,
right?
Wow.
You know, I'm used to all these stodgy academic conferences.
Nobody claps at those.
Wow, I even get a clap.
That's great.
But I want to start with the gratitude one.
And it's a story. We were just in Hungary.
My wife wanted to go to see for the second time
the home that her mom grew up in.
And her mom grew up in a small town in Hungary, south of Budapest,
and they were German-Hungarians.
So what they had to deal with in World War II
was that her brothers were recruited by the Germans at gunpoint to go and fight the war
on the German side, and one of them ended up in Siberia and died when he was captured by the
Russians.
But on the other side, the Soviets,
the Russians,
were coming in at the end of the war,
and they were just destroying everything in their midst that had any hint of being German.
So they
had to run away with their lives.
And they had a little tiny cart. They weren't wealthy anyway,
and they were taking this cart across Europe, literally,
so that they wouldn't get killed by
the Russians,
now the Russians coming that way.
And my mother-in-law would tell the story how as
a 13-year-old, 14-year-old, they were in this column like a scene from a movie.
And they're
going along.
And she looks up and she sees a bomb coming from a plane.
And the bomb is flying down.
And she turns to someone next to her and says, we're all going to die.
And the fellow says, no,
they're going to die.
And they did die because the bomb was, you know, moving overhead and went and
blew up a whole bunch of people.
Well, they were so worried about what's going on in Europe that
they went all the way across the Atlantic and all the way across America and ended up in LA.
So German speakers in LA.
But she went through so much, and she was an amazing prayer warrior
and a very direct person in every good way.
And so very interesting,
every meal that we had,
they ended up in San Diego. I mean, that's paradise, right?
And every meal we had, she would
say,
you know, I'm so grateful.
I'm so grateful. I'm going to cry.
But she said, what I would have
given for this meal when I was a little girl, what I would have given. And here I am with,
you know, my two daughters and their husbands and my grandkids.
And she never lost that gratitude.
And her name was Lydia.
It's a beautiful name, biblical name.
So she didn't have any room for,
you know, the little things of life.
I mean, she did a lot for a lot of people, but she
basically was very, very gracious.
And she emphasized all the time this gratitude.
So
they made me do the eulogy at her funeral because,
you know, I could get through it and nobody else
really could.
You know that there were as many people at her funeral as a 90-year-old as there
are in this room.
And people were walking up to us and talking about Lydia and what she'd done in
their lives and all these kinds of things.
So I couldn't tell any mother-in-law jokes.
Do you
anybody know what mother-in-law jokes are?
Are you too young for that?
Okay, you marry in and you
always,
well, you often have issues with your mother-in-law who, you know, nobody's good enough
for their daughter or good enough for their son or whatever it is. So can I tell a mother-in-law
joke?
Okay, it's chapel, but okay.
One guy says to the other, you know, my mother-in-law is a real
angel.
The other one says,
wow,
lucky you, mine's still living.
Or one says,
you know,
the definition of mixed feelings is watching your mother-in-law drive over the cliff in your new
Porsche.
Okay, not ideal,
okay, not ideal.
But I had to do it.
I hope you're not offended.
So she had the gratitude,
no room for fear,
no room for resentment,
just all in because she knew her identity and she knew that she had a reason to be grateful.
She was redeemed by God, but she also was redeemed in this life by surviving those horrors of World War II.
So I'd like you to pause just for a second.
What are you grateful for?
Take a couple minutes,
a couple seconds.
What are you grateful for?
I can find a lot of things that I'm resentful about,
a lot of things that I'm frustrated by,
a lot of things like that.
You know, even when you're married, I've been married,
what, 30,
oh,
don't tell my wife. I'm forgetting.
It's 32 years, 33 years.
And like my neighbor says,
you know, I agreed to always agree with my wife,
and then we can both be wrong.
Guys,
remember that someday. Nobody got it, but okay. We can both be wrong,
okay? That was meant to be
a joke, but that's okay.
So think of what you're grateful for. Think of what you're grateful for.
Gratitude will drown out lots of bad things, not just psychologically,
but it'll do that
spiritually as well.
Every day is a gift because in God's economy,
nothing is wasted.
Absolutely
nothing is wasted.
And we are so fortunate that we have the opportunities that we have in our
lives, especially in this side of modern medicine and bathrooms and running water and,
hmm,
iPhones?
No, no, no. I don't know if that's a gift or not, but anyway,
I'm thankful for mine,
but I spent too much time in it.
The second one, gratitude and trust.
Okay, can you think of some
characters in the Bible?
Some of you may know the Bible better than others,
but can you think of
some characters in the Bible who show tremendous trust in the good times and the bad? Anybody want
to throw some out?
What?
Oh,
yeah. Okay. Yes,
exactly right. Gave Jesus the water. Excellent.
Any others?
Yeah.
Abraham.
Okay. What about Abraham?
I mean, he's got a dysfunctional family.
He's kind of scared and, you know, doesn't always do the right thing, but at least God says go and
goes,
right?
Okay, anybody else?
Job,
okay,
we got a lot of Job people here. How many people
relate to Job?
I can relate to Job at times, right? Anybody else?
Hannah,
Hannah was fantastic.
Hannah like went and prayed.
I mean, you all know your Bibles, good job faculty.
So they basically,
you know, they're these biblical characters and they find themselves trusting.
Now you're all
too young to remember Pearl Jam and Nirvana,
right?
Okay.
Now I have, now I respect you. I,
until then I was like, cause I spent several years in Seattle and, uh, that's why I sometimes don't
hear so well. My wife was busy doing her medical residency and I was busy going to concerts and I
literally was up near the front when the so-called, I won't do it, but well, will you, will you support
me when the,
I know I can't do it, but the mosh pit and all that, but you know, that's,
That's a trust thing when you fall back and you fall onto somebody.
So all these biblical characters,
in spite of the evidence,
as it were,
being like, oh, you know, nothing's going to happen.
This is not going to work out.
They trusted God and they still acted.
And, I mean, Job is really quite the character because Job literally refused to sort of throw in the towel and refused to curse God,
even though his friends were theologically so on the top of it, but he still wouldn't do it.
So Job,
yeah.
So though he slay me, I will praise him still. It's an unbelievable thing.
Trust is hard, though.
Trust is hard. It's hard to trust other people.
It's hard to trust ourselves
sometimes.
As I said, I'm an idiot, so it's hard to trust myself at a lot of times.
But at the same
time,
when we move beyond,
beyond Job's struggles,
beyond some of these biblical characters even,
when we experience things and we see in retrospect,
looking back at the sovereignty of God,
that God had brought you even the bad times to prepare you for something even a little bit better.
And it's really, really hard to feel that way when you're in the middle of the moment
and everything seems to be falling apart and people let you down and, you know, you're singing
and all kinds of country music because it emotes in the way that, you know, helps you vent.
But, yeah, trust is vitally,
vitally important in life.
Every time you use the credit card, like, somebody's trusting you that you're going to follow up on it.
But the biblical characters,
Habakkuk,
Paul,
Abraham,
Job,
they had this amazing trust,
amazing trust.
And what did Job get?
Oh, lost his family.
Hmm.
Well, he got another family back, I guess.
What did Abraham get?
Anybody remember what part of the inheritance of the Bible did Abraham have when he died?
What part of the whole promised land did Abraham have when he died?
Anybody remember?
Ah, that's not quite correct because he had a tomb.
I mean, how's that?
I'm going to make you into a great nation and bless the whole world through you,
But by the way, you know, when you die,
you'll have about this much space to yourself in eternity.
But it'll all work out.
So that's what I would call trust.
And that's why Abraham really, really is, you know, one of the rock stars of the Bible, right?
Okay, so G,
T,
D.
Okay, don't be an idiot.
And, I mean, how many times are we all idiots,
different situations in our life?
Just ask my wife or the sponsor of this lecture tonight,
Mark Lanier, our dear friend.
I mean,
he helps me not to be an idiot at times because he's very honest with me,
and he'll tell me what he really thinks, and that's actually a real blessing.
But more often than not, my kids and my wife have told me, just don't be an idiot.
Don't be an idiot.
Now, there are lots of ways you can be an idiot,
but my reason for saying don't be an idiot is that that's kind of biblical wisdom.
And biblical wisdom,
even whether you're a follower of Jesus at this point in your life or you're not,
there are tremendous things you can learn from reading your Bible.
And I believe God will work through your reading the Bible,
even though it feels at times like so-and-so begat so-and-so begat so-and-so.
No, no, there's a lot of just amazing and powerful wisdom in the Bible by any metric for believers or non-believers.
But I hope if you're not, that you'll really read your Bible and come to a place of faith if you're not there now.
But biblical wisdom is essentially doing what's good and pleasing to God.
So you have a conscience,
right?
What's good and pleasing to God, but also what is beneficial to others and also what's beneficial to you.
Now, I grew up, I was born in the Congo and grew up with parents who just,
my dad was a professor and just, they were givers.
They just gave,
you know,
everything in their lives for the ministry and for all these different things.
And I learned kind of that, oh, that's what you do.
I mean, you just, you don't think, you just give.
So sometimes I'm an idiot for not filtering my giving.
I mean, why would I, you know, and I'm at the gas station.
Do I just want to give my car away?
I don't know.
Maybe if somebody really, really needs it and God leads me to do that, okay, maybe.
But generally,
I just probably wouldn't just give my car away.
So again, back to my mother-in-law, Lydia.
She told me very early on when I met her,
she said, you know, I perceive,
John,
she was like, it's like a rabbinic mind.
It's like this brilliant mind.
And she had like, you know,
just basically a high school education.
But education and wisdom
don't necessarily go hand in hand.
Let me just tell you.
And so she said, John, I perceive that you
would give the shirt off your back to anybody.
You would just give the shirt off your back to anybody.
But maybe you need to realize that you're not always on the road to Jericho.
And think about that for a minute.
The road to Jericho is where several people didn't help the person in distress who had been robbed and beaten up.
And one person did help.
But it was a really good helping thing for me to not be an idiot sometimes with actually over-giving.
And not filtering some of my giving, thinking strategically.
I'm not talking about money.
I'm talking about time.
I'm talking about whatever it may be.
And so the road to Jericho,
that story that she told
was really, really helpful to me.
Basically,
she was telling me in nice words,
and I loved my mother-in-law,
don't be an idiot,
right?
And so hopefully I learned a little bit about that,
how to maybe not be an idiot.
So I want to just talk,
remaining just a couple of minutes,
who is the wisest person who ever lived?
Solomon?
Solomon?
Anybody?
What?
Somebody said Solomon.
You know, Solomon,
for a stage of his life,
yes, but then he became an idiot,
right? And he blew it.
He had everything and he blew it.
Anybody else?
Okay,
Jesus. Now,
okay, so we're tracking.
Jesus,
you know, all roads, yes,
do lead to Jesus. And in our lives as well, the one who created the universe is also the one who
loves and cares for us.
But there's a word in Isaiah 52 and 53.
Don't worry, I'm not going to
go all wonky on you.
But the word is, here my servant will be wise.
We translate wise.
But in Hebrew,
words can have lots and lots of meanings based,
as in English,
based on their
context.
So hine yaskil avdi means,
indeed,
my servant Jesus,
Isaiah 52,
is wise,
discerning,
perceptive, and obviously not an idiot.
And on top of that, successful,
successful.
We sometimes as
Christians don't think of success and wisdom or success in the Bible going hand in hand,
But it's all those things together,
and it's incredible.
That word is multivalent.
It's got multiple meanings.
And what's beautiful about that is that Jesus models for us that biblical wisdom,
that biblical wisdom, not just don't be an idiot,
but be wise and discerning and thoughtful and strategic,
strategic.
So what are the three letters?
GTD.
Great,
and I hope you will take those three letters with you.
I'm older,
balding guy walking up and down the stage asking you questions.
That's irrelevant,
but I hope that Jesus will work in your heart and encourage you with that and will take you
where he wants you to go because we learned that no purpose of God can be thwarted.
And I think a biblical life is well lived through,
what is it? Say after me, gratitude,
Trust and...
Okay,
I won't be an idiot.
And how do we end this?
Do I say you're dismissed?
Well, I feel such power.
No, you're not dismissed.
No, you're dismissed.
No, thanks so much.
Appreciate it.